Slavery Antiquity and Its Legacy

by duBois, Page

• ISBN13: 9780195380859
• ISBN10: 0195380851
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's momentous words are closely related to the French concept of "liberte, egalite, fraternitye"; and both ideas incarnate a notion of freedom as inalienable human right that in the modern world we expect to take for granted. In the ancient world, by contrast, the concepts of freedom and equality had little purchase. Athenians, Spartans and Romans all possessed slaves or helots (unfree bondsmen), and society was unequal at every stratum. Why, then, if modern society abominates slavery, does what antiquity thought about serfdom matter today? Page duBois shows that slavery, far from being extinct, is alive and well in the contemporary era. Slaves are associated not just with the Colosseum of ancient Rome, and films depicting ancient slaves, but also with Californian labor factories and south Asian sweatshops, while young women and children appear increasingly vulnerable to sexual trafficking. Juxtaposing such modern experiences of bondage (economic or sexual) with slavery in antiquity, the author explores the writings on the subject of Aristotle, Plautus, Terence and Aristophanes. She also examines the case of Spartacus, famous leader of a Roman slave rebellion, and relates ancient notions of liberation to the all-too-common immigrant experience of enslavement to a globalized world of rampant corporatism and exploitative capitalism.

Author Biography

Page duBois is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Living Slaves	p. 1
Slavery Defined	p. 3
Numbers and Places	p. 6
The Poetics of Slavery	p. 7
Slavery in the Media	p. 9
Slavery and 'Race'	p. 11
Abolition: Or, What is to be Done?	p. 12
Differences	p. 17
Racialised Slavery	p. 23
Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose	p. 25
The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself	p. 27
The History of Racialised Slavery	p. 30
Slaves in America	p. 37
Frederick Douglass	p. 43
Legacies of Racialised Slavery	p. 45
Ancient Ideologies	p. 50
Slavery in the Hebrew Bible	p. 51
Slavery in Ancient Greek Political Theory	p. 54
Slavery in the New Testament and in Christianity	p. 66
Ante-bellum Arguments for Slavery in North America	p. 69
Ancient Slavery	p. 76
Slavery in Israel	p. 77
Slavery in Greece	p. 78
Slavery in Rome	p. 94
Spartacus and Gladiator: Slaves in Film	p. 109
The Ten Commandments	p. 113
Spartacus	p. 120
Gladiator	p. 131
Epilogue	p. 140
Some Suggestions for Further Reading	p. 145
Notes	p. 146
Index	p. 153
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